Racism is not a factor driving conservative opposition to President Barack Obama, according to the results of focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps, a Democratic organization, released on Friday.

Nevertheless, members of the conservative base of the GOP said they believe the president is pursuing a “secret agenda” designed to push the country toward socialism.

“This is a pretty dominant view in the Republican Party,” said Democratic strategist James Carville, who worked on the report.

Rather than attributing their dislike of Obama to race, participants in the focus groups, which were a project of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, said that their disaffection was borne out of a sense that the president was orchestrating an effort to steer the country away from its “founding principles.”

“They want him to fail,” said pollster Stan Greenberg. “It’s not just a political motivation, it’s an ethical imperative given what they think Obama’s goals are.”

The research team held focus groups from Sept. 29-30 with conservative voters in suburban Atlanta and another set of meetings with conservative-leaning independents in the Cleveland area. The Atlanta groups consisted of older white, self-identified conservatives who voted for both John McCain and a Republican Congressional candidate. The Cleveland groups included older white swing voters — half of whom voted for Obama and half of whom supported McCain in 2008. In the two places, researchers found vastly different results.

Whether or not they voted for Obama, the independent voters said they wanted to see the president succeed and were not concerned that he was championing so-called socialist policies.

“On virtually every point of discussion around President Obama and the major issues facing our country, these two audiences simply saw the world in fundamentally different ways — underscoring the extreme disconnect of the conservative Republican base voters,” the report’s authors wrote.

Democracy Corps senior adviser, Karl Agne, who participated in a conference call with reporters on Friday to announce the findings, also said conservatives were deeply skeptical of Obama’s political rise. In the Atlanta sessions, Agne said, participants routinely asked: “Who got him here? He couldn’t possibly have done it on his own. There has to be money, there has to be power behind him.”

“That’s one of the things they desperately want to uncover about him,” he said.

Agne said conservatives “truly identify themselves as a minority and feel under attack in a lot of ways.” He added that members of this voting bloc also explicitly rejected the mainstream media and labeled conservative commentators on talk radio and on Fox News as “truth tellers.”

Despite their vehement opposition to Obama and the Democratic agenda, Carville noted that conservatives were also unhappy with their own party primarily because they believed Republican leaders are abandoning core party principles.

“When Republicans try to be like Democrat-lite,” one conservative focus group participant said, “they’re not going to convert any Democrats to them and they’re just going to lose conservatives.”